


all the good love

by glorious_spoon



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies)
Genre: Developing Relationship, Dubious Consent, F/M, Misunderstandings, Sex Pollen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-29
Updated: 2017-06-29
Packaged: 2018-11-20 19:13:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11341593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glorious_spoon/pseuds/glorious_spoon
Summary: Peter and Gamora get accidentally dosed with sex pollen while on a job, and have to deal with the predictably awkward aftermath.





	all the good love

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [this prompt](http://guardian-kink.livejournal.com/2727.html?thread=1769895#t1769895) on the GOTG kink meme.

She wakes slowly, cocooned in warmth. A steady heartbeat beneath her cheek, bare skin against hers.

Bare skin _everywhere._ Her hand is resting on the warm curve of a hipbone, her leg hooked over a hairy thigh. A large hand rests, warm and heavy, on the center of her back, just below her shoulder blades. She can smell sweat and when she shifts, there’s slickness between her thighs.

Familiar smells. A familiar body wrapped around hers, neither of them wearing a stitch of clothing, and she has _no memory of how this came to be._

Fingers curl against her skin, and then Peter murmurs, “Hey. Are you okay?”

It’s a very different tone than she was expecting, given their positions. He doesn’t sound cocky. If anything, he sounds worried.

“What happened?” Gamora asks, levering herself carefully up. They are on the ground, she realizes, curled in a nest of both their clothes with Peter’s long coat draped over them, an unfamiliar forest all around. There’s a strange, flowery taste lingering on her tongue.

— _a garden, there was a garden, abandoned and overgrown, enormous hothouse flowers dipping heavy heads in the cool breeze, and she reached for one, fingers brushing loose a glittering cloud of pollen over both of them_ —

She blinks and looks down. Peter is looking up at her, something wary in his light green eyes. His lips are bruised, and there are purplish marks blooming on the pale hollow of his throat. A faint dusting of golden pollen is still caught in his hair.

“What happened?” she asks again.

He licks his lips. She follows the gesture with her eyes and—

— _rough tongue and the hot press of lips, breath shuddering against her skin_ —

Flinches. Hard. Peter notices— how could he not, given how they’re pressed together— and makes a face.

“Uh. How much do you remember?”

“We were… scouting,” she says slowly, piecing together scraps of memory. “There was supposed to be an abandoned safe-house…”

“Yeah, well, we found it,” Peter mutters, sliding out from under her and sitting up. He is definitely… very naked. There are more purplish bite-marks on his chest. “Turns out the previous owner was quite the horticulturalist.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Gamora says, and pokes at one of the marks on his chest. “Do those hurt?”

He bats her hand away, blush staining his cheeks. “No.”

“Did I do that?”

“Yeah.” He rubs a hand over his face. “You don’t remember anything, huh?”

Gamora sits as well, putting some space between them, feeling her temper flare. “Perhaps it would assist my memory if you would simply _explain_.”

Peter turns his face skyward, as though interrogating an unseen entity there. “How do these things keep happening to me?” he asks— rhetorically, she assumes, as he continues speaking before she can respond. “Okay, look, basically, whoever lived here was keeping Paradisium lilies, and we got covered in pollen, and… well, the rest is history.”

“Why is the rest history? What is this pollen?”

“Aphrodisiac,” Peter says. “Very, uh, potent one. Sometimes can affect the memory. Way I understand it, it’s basically like a really bad bender with double the questionable hook-ups and half the hangover. So, hey, at least you don’t have a headache, right?”

Gamora considers this for a moment, considers pressing for more detail, and decides against it. It’s fairly clear what happened, anyway. “I want my clothes back,” she says coolly, instead.

“You’re laying on ‘em,” Peter retorts, and rolls away from her to stand. Gamora averts her eyes, disentangling her garments from the pile. Her shirt is torn at the seams, and her underwear completely shredded, but at least her trousers are more or less intact. She tugs them on, ignoring how the seam abrades uncomfortably at the tender flesh between her thighs.

When she looks up, Peter is half-dressed, holding his shirt— what’s left of it— with a rueful expression. “Well, that’s a loss,” he mutters. “I liked that shirt.”

“You should be more careful, then,” Gamora snaps, pulling her own shirt over her head. One shoulder seam is split, flapping loose against her skin.

“ _I_ wasn’t the one who…” he shakes his head. “Never mind. We should get back to the ship. I need a shower.”

“Yes, you do,” she sniffs, and stands, ignoring the hand he offers her.

They walk back to the ship in silence.

* * *

The ship is empty; Rocket and Groot are down in what passes for a settlement on this tiny planet and the others are off-world. Gamora is not sure if that’s a mercy or not, but at least they don’t have to try to explain themselves to Rocket and his coarse idea of humor. Not that Peter’s is much better, actually, but he hasn’t cracked a single joke yet. It’s disconcerting.

“You want first dibs on the shower?” he asks quietly after the bay doors have slid shut behind them.

She does, she really does, but she shakes her head. “No. You need it more.”

A corner of Peter’s mouth lifts slightly. For a moment, he looks like he’s going to say something, but finally he just nods, tosses his ruined shirt in the direction of the laundry chute, and retreats into the head.

Gamora goes into the mess, sinks onto a chair, and stares unseeingly at the tabletop before her.

She should be unbothered by this. She is no virgin, and Peter is a friend, an attractive male, someone she would happily have bedded in other circumstances. She is uninjured. No one is dead. This should be a regrettable embarrassment, nothing more.

It’s some time before she hears the slow, heavy tread of his boots on the floor. She doesn’t look up as he hesitates, takes a breath, then lets it out and crosses over to the far end of the table to sit down. She can still smell him. It’s mostly just soap, but underneath that there’s the scent of his skin, the memory of how he tasted on her lips—

She drives her fist into the meat of her thigh with punishing force.

“Shower’s free,” Peter says after a long moment, subdued.

“Thank you,” Gamora manages, and pushes out her chair to stand. Peter doesn’t reach for her, doesn’t say anything else at all, and she escapes to the head without meeting his eyes.

When she comes out, after standing under the hot water until her skin can no longer remember the touch of his hands, the common areas are empty.

She’s not disappointed about that. She isn’t. There’s nothing for them to talk about, and she has a box full of odds and ends in her quarters that need repairing, just waiting for a quiet moment. Those are rare enough in their line of work; there’s no reason to waste one.

* * *

She is dreaming.

She knows that, that she is dreaming. It does not happen often, and it is rarely so… vivid. So disorienting.

She is dreaming, and in her dream is the safe-house, a small, ramshackle building of corrugated metal, garden grown up green and wild around it.

She reaches up to touch a flower, and a glittering cloud of pollen falls all around her. Peter is there a moment later, his hand bruisingly tight as he yanks her back, and she blinks up at him, surprise edging into annoyance.

“What are you doing?” she asks sharply, and that’s all she has time for before a wave of liquid heat rolls through her body, leaving her weak in the knees. Peter’s hands are hot on her shoulders, holding her firmly an arm’s-length away.

 _Too far_ , she thinks, and then blinks.

“What,” she begins again. Her voice is thick and slow. The entire surface of her skin is prickling. She feels—

“We should get back to the ship,” Peter says firmly. “Seriously, we should get back to the ship _now._ ”

And she blinks again, and Peter is beneath her and he isn’t pushing her away now; he’s naked, warm and pliant beneath her hands, a beautiful flush high in his cheeks, and he’s reaching for her, steadying her as she slides down onto his cock, and he trembles when she begins to move—

There’s a crash somewhere in the distance, and Gamora jerks awake to find herself alone, tangled in the sheets in the cool darkness of her tiny bunk. Her heart is thudding wildly in her chest.

Another crash, and then the metallic _clang_ of the cargo door slamming shut. She swings her feet around onto the floor and makes her way across the room. Irritable noises are coming from the outside hallway; it sounds as though Rocket and Groot, at least, have returned.

“I am _Groot._ ”

“So go stand under your sunlamp for a couple of hours and stop whining about it,” retorts Rocket’s voice. His light footsteps patter in the wake of Groot’s long, stumping strides, but he pauses when she opens her door and ducks her head out. “Oh, hey, Gamora. I didn’t think you were awake.”

“I _wasn’t_ ,” she says sharply. “What time is it?”

He shrugs. “Don’t know. Late. Hey, did you and Quill find the place? ‘Cause otherwise this entire trip has been one incredible waste of time.”

“We found it,” Gamora says shortly.

When she doesn’t elaborate, Rocket spreads his paws, whiskers bristling in annoyance. “And…?”

“I don’t believe there was anything useful remaining there,” she says. She has no idea whether or not that’s true— it seems unlikely that Peter took the time to go back and search the house— but the sooner they leave this planet, the better.

“Figures,” Rocket mutters. “I just hope Quill’s contact on Ilea has what we need, then. Especially if we’re gonna have to _pay._ ” He spits the last word like a curse.

“I am quite sure that she will,” Gamora says coolly. “I’m going back to bed.”

“Yeah, well, you do that,” Rocket says, then pauses, peering down the hallway after Groot. “No, stay out of the— alright already, I’m coming. _Teenagers,_ ” he adds, in an exasperated voice, and stomps away.

Gamora slides the door shut and rests her forehead against the cool metal. Her bed is rumpled and she feels restless, too hot, like something is calibrated wrong. She knows she’s not going to sleep again anytime soon.

* * *

Somehow, it doesn’t occur to her that Peter is probably sleeping until after she has already knocked on his door. She almost turns around and leaves, but before she can there are soft footsteps, and the panel slides open to reveal Peter, shirtless and towheaded, squinting blearily in the dim light. “Uh. Hi?”

She means to apologize for waking him, to make some excuse, but somehow when she opens her mouth what comes out, brittle and belligerent, is, “Did we kiss?”

Peter shakes his head, squeezes his eyes shut, then opens them and peers down at her like he suspects she might be some sort of ambulatory late-night hallucination. “What?”

She folds her arms. It is already too late to flee with dignity, so they may as well have it out right now. “When we mated. Did you kiss me?”

“You really wanna have this conversation right here in the middle of the hallway?”

Fair point. “Can I come in?”

“That depends,” Peter says. “Are you gonna stab me to death in my own bunk?”

She takes a sharp breath, but before she can give voice to the retort on the tip of her tongue, she sees his slight smile, the tentative humor in his expression. It’s a peace offering, she realizes, or as close to one as she’s likely to get. “No,” she says instead. “I’m not going to stab you.”

“Well, in that case, come on in.” He steps aside to let her pass. His bunk is, as always, in a state of barely controlled chaos, the bedclothes rumpled, his little music machine resting on the pillow. Tinny music is still audible from the earpieces. The door slides shut behind her, and Peter turns away, roots through a pile of clothes for a moment before coming up with a t-shirt..

“Did we kiss?” Gamora asks again.

“No.” Peter yanks the shirt down over his head, leaving him even more tousle-haired than before. The thin cloth clings to his chest, the slope of his shoulders, leaving very little to the imagination. She keeps her eyes resolutely on his face. “No, we did not kiss.”

“Why not?”

He eyes her for a moment. “Is that a trick question?”

“Would you just answer me?”

“Okay, okay,” Peter says, rubbing at a bruise on his jaw that’s nearly concealed by scruff. “You kinda had… a pretty clear agenda in mind. Didn’t seem like it was a good idea to shake things up.”

Gamora remembers his shirt tearing under her impatient hands, remembers pressing him down with her thighs and hips—

“Do you want to kiss me?”

“You really need me to answer that?”

“Yes,” she says flatly. If what they did together, the way she remembers touching him, the way he _let_ her touch him, was just the drug, just mindless animal instinct—

Peter sighs, scrubs a hand through his hair, and sinks down onto the rumpled bed. “Well, yeah,” he says bluntly, after a moment. His mouth curls into a lopsided, self-deprecating smile. “That ain’t exactly news.”

“Oh,” Gamora says.

“It’s not news, is it?” Peter asks after a moment, looking up at her. There’s something soft and open in his face that she almost can’t bear to look at. “Because I thought we had, you know, discussed that…” He wobbles a hand from side to side. “That unspoken thing.”

“If we had, I don’t believe it would be unspoken,” Gamora says, but the sharp sensation that’s been lodged in the back of her throat since she woke up in his arms is abating slightly.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean to… I’m bad at this.”

“We both are,” she offers.

That earns her a sharp grin. “Ain’t that the truth. I had a whole plan, you know. Dinner, dancing, maybe some jewelry, Barry White…”

“What are you talking about?”

“Terran dating customs,” Peter says, with a wave of his hand. “Courting rituals. It doesn’t matter. The point is, drug-induced hookups in some smuggler’s cave were _not_ part of the plan. At all.”

“There was no cave,” Gamora points out, but she knows she’s smiling, too wide, too open, helplessly reflecting back the warmth in his expression. Courting rituals, he said.

“Also not really the point.”

She wishes that she could bring herself to step into his space and wrap her arms around him, rest her cheek against his chest and hear the slow, rhythmic sound of his heart. He would allow it, she’s very sure. Peter is a tactile person, affectionate in a way that Gamora can hardly begin to grasp. It is rare for her to touch someone unless she’s trying to kill them. He is always the one to bridge the gap between them, but he does not move.

She realizes with a start that he’s being _careful_ with her, unsure of his welcome in a way he never has been before.

“We could… eat dinner together?” she offers, tentative. She is unpracticed at this, but of all the courting rituals she has encountered in her travels, it is far from the strangest. “And maybe dance. And then you could kiss me. If you wanted to.”

Peter huffs out a breath of laughter, but before she can even begin to feel self-conscious, he adds, “Yeah. I mean, I’d like that. A lot.”

“Dinner, then.” Gamora says firmly. “Tomorrow, on Ilea. We should make planetfall in time.”

Peter grins up at her. “It’s a date.”

**Author's Note:**

> I don't even know, man. I've been noodling around with this thing for like a month, and I'm still not really happy with it. But, hey, it's done, so I'm tossing it to the tender mercies of AO3.


End file.
